The Palace at Midnight: The Collected Work of Robert Silverberg, Volume Five

by Robert Silverberg

  “I am. All that rain—the traffic skidding around—”

  She kissed the tip of his nose. “Get a good night’s rest,” she said.

  He had trouble sleeping. He felt her presence inches away as a pulsating vibration that made his fingers and toes tingle disagreeably. That she might have a lover frightened him, for it meant he held faulty assumptions about their relationship, that his evaluation of reality was defective. And he had to admit that he was upset on a much simpler level: a stranger was creeping into his bed, and he hated that as a violation of his rights. He found his reaction embarrassing. Mere jealousy, he thought, is ugly and stupid and very much beneath me. Nonetheless, beneath him or not, he felt what he felt, and it hurt him keenly.

  Eventually he fell asleep, and when he woke to brilliant October sunlight streaming through the blazing leaves of the red maple outside their bedroom everything seemed normal again. Jason was using the synthesizer, getting it to play something that almost might have been Three Blind Mice. Finch was intensely pleased by that. At work that day he thought sometimes about Nort, but not in any very painful way—some neighborhood person, he supposed, an artist Jennifer had met at the museum, maybe, who drops around for a drink and some artistic chitchat, most likely gay, gentle, fond of children, harmless. He was much more interested in that peculiar glowing sphere. That night he went into Jason’s room to examine it again. Ingenious, the play of colors, the tantalizing way it almost went one-toned as you handled it and then slipped away into patterns. He had no idea how it worked. Sensitive to skin-temperature fluctuations, perhaps, or possibly even pressure-sensitive, though it was solid as a marble. And what generated the changing colors and projected them to the surface? He was tempted to ask Jason to get a second sphere from Nort that he could try to take apart.

  The week after next he was up in Boston for three days on his regular monthly trip. The first two went well; but on the evening of the third, as he returned to his motel after an overly winy dinner with a buyer from a Cambridge data-shop chain, the incandescent image of Jennifer getting into bed with Nort suddenly blazed in his soul. The Nort that Finch invented was older than he, perhaps thirty-seven, dark and muscular, with a dancer’s supple body and an easy, self-assured manner. Finch bit his lip and tried to force the unwanted vision away, but it grew ever more vivid and ever more graphic, and the pain of it was astonishing. He thought seriously of driving home in the middle of the night. But that would be insane, he realized.

  He came home on schedule with the usual gifts, and when he gave Jason his—a little screen on which he could draw with a light-pen—he feared the boy, still enthralled by some phenomenal incomprehensible thing that Nort had just brought him, might snub it. But Jason said nothing about Nort and was instantly fascinated by the screen. Finch felt a surge of relief until Samantha drew him aside, an hour later, to tell him, “He was here again.”

  “Nort?”

  “Oui. Mardi et marcredi.”

  “Mercredi,” he corrected automatically. Her French still had some flaws; but she was only seven. He turned away to hide his look of torment. Two nights, again. Tuesday, Wednesday. He had no idea what he was supposed to do. Confront her with his suspicions and demand an explanation? They had never even had a real quarrel. Swallow his agony and count himself grateful that there was someone here protecting his home and family while he was away? Sure. Sure. In a dull voice he said, “What do Nort and maman do when he’s visiting her?”

  “They have dinner after we go to sleep. Then they stay up late and talk. In the morning he asks us questions about school and things and tries to be nice to us.”

  In the morning. Finch winced.

  He forced himself to make love with Jennifer that evening so she would not suspect that he suspected, but he was without desire and barely managed to enter her, which made it all even worse. Guilty herself, she would want to assume the worst in him, and this uncharacteristic failure of virility after three nights away from her probably would lead her to think he had been with women in Boston, which would encourage her to give herself even more flagrantly to her own lover, which—

  In the two weeks before his next road-trip he thought constantly of what would take place between Jennifer and Nort while he was away. He was jittery, remote, short-tempered, and morose; Jennifer seemed to be trying to please him, but whatever she did was counterproductive, and he was reduced to pleading business worries and headaches to keep from having to blurt out what was really on his mind. He wanted no confrontations with her. The love he bore her should be great enough to allow scope for a little discreet adultery, and if it did not, well, he would try to work on his attitudes.

  But as he drove off toward Hartford under gray November skies, he imagined Nort’s car gliding into the garage, Nort entering the house, Nort with his hands on her breasts, Nort leading her toward the bedroom. The absurd intensity of his obsession alarmed and dismayed him. But he could not control his feelings. In Hartford he checked into his motel and drifted like a man in a daze through his first three calls; he must have seemed in terrible shape, because everyone commented on the way he looked; he had two drinks before making his fourth call, which he never did, and then he canceled the call and returned to the motel. There he had another drink, ate a hamburger in the coffee-shop, and stared unseeingly at the television set until midnight, when he abruptly rose, dressed, stumbled outside, and grimly began to drive homeward. He knew that this was absolute madness. He would let himself into the house and catch them in bed together, and then the three of them would sit down and discuss things. And he had no idea what would happen after that.

  Just before two in the morning he parked in front of his house and saw, with perverse satisfaction, that a lamp was lit in the bedroom. Strangely calm, Finch peered through the garage window, but saw only Jennifer’s station-wagon inside. So Nort was a neighborhood person, Finch thought. She phones him and he walks over here and she lets him in.

  Noiselessly Finch unlocked the door, punched in his identity code on the burglar-alarm keyboard, slipped off his shoes, and tiptoed upstairs. His heart pounded with such startling force that he began to fear real damage to it. At the top of the stairs he paused, paralyzed with shame and misgivings. Leave them alone, he told himself. This is unquestionably the most stupid and reckless and self-defeating thing you’ve done in your life. He was quivering. He did not dare go forward.

  “Dale?” Jennifer called from the bedroom. “Dale, is that you? It better be you!”

  “Me,” he croaked, and lurched into the room.

  She was alone, sitting up in bed, looking frightened and surprised. Finch, ashen and shaking, still had the presence of mind to scan the room for spoor of Nort, an overlooked wristwatch, a stray sock. Nothing. Jennifer was naked. She slept that way with him, but she had once told him that she always wore pajamas when he was away, for warmth. Certainly Nort was still here. Nobody jumps out a second-floor window to escape an angry husband. In the closet? In the bathroom? Under the bed? Finch knew he had created a preposterous farce.

  “I felt ill,” he mumbled. “Dizzy—hot flashes—I couldn’t be alone. I just climbed into the car and headed for home—to be with you—the kids—”

  “Dale, what’s the matter? What hurts you?” She was as tense and anguished as he was, but she seemed to be recovering her poise. She got out of bed—were those the red imprints of Nort’s fingers on her breasts and thighs?—and pulled on her robe and came to him. “If you were so sick, you shouldn’t have tried to drive all the way from Hartford. Why didn’t you call first? Why didn’t you try to have the motel get you a doctor?” He swayed. His legs felt like concrete. He leaned against her, sniffing for the other man’s cologne or even the smell of his sweat, and let Jennifer ease him down to the bed. He wanted to ask her where she had hidden Nort. But the words would not come. She helped him undress and brought him aspirins, and turned the thermostat up because he was shivering so violently, and clasped him in her arms. Her body was so warm and
yielding and tender against him that he nearly began to cry. He let himself relax in her embrace, and to his amazement his desires rose and he reached for her. She tried to quiet him, telling him she was too exhausted for any such thing, but there was no halting him and he took her quickly and with uncharacteristic force. Jennifer met his thrusts with a vigor he had not encountered in months. It must be because Nort’s done all the foreplay for me, he thought bitterly, and came at once, with a sob, and collapsed against her breast. At once he was asleep, and in the morning it all seemed like a dreadful dream, nothing more. Finch insisted on going back to Hartford and making his rounds, and would hear no objection from Jennifer. But first he went into Samantha’s room and, cutting short her expression of surprise at seeing her father return from his trip so soon, asked her bluntly whether Nort had come for dinner the night before.

  “Yes,” she said. “He was here when I got home from school. Is he still upstairs with maman?”

  Finch asked himself, as he drove shakily back to Hartford, whether to seek the advice of friends, his parents, the local minister, a therapist. He had never done any of that. His life had always been an amiable progression toward deeper happiness. By the time he reached the motel, he knew he would consult no one, would take no action at all, would simply wait and see. He would let Jennifer make the next move.

  But she said nothing and he said nothing and after his next trip, a brief one, he found Jason with another strange new toy, an arrangement of gleaming wires that crossed and recrossed and seemed to disappear at one juncture into a baffling uncharted dimension, visible only as a dazzling flicker of green light. Yes, the boy said, Nort had given it to him. Finch felt a surge of frantic anger. He was almost desperate now to bring this thing to some sort of resolution, for it was devouring him. Jennifer remained tender and loving and outwardly unchanged. Finch suffered. He could not push his fears and confusions below the threshold of awareness for more than an hour or two at a time; he was losing weight; everyone commented on his frayed and frazzled appearance. He was drowning in the silent turbulence of his altered life.

  A second time he returned prematurely from a sales trip, hoping to catch them together. Again the light was on in the bedroom in the middle of the night. Again he stumbled in to find Jennifer flustered but alone. He explained that he was drunk and bewildered. “I think I’m having some sort of a breakdown,” he told her, and this time he called in sick and took a week off, though the Christmas holidays were coming and it looked very bad to do that now. Impulsively he went with Jennifer to Bermuda for four days, leaving the children with his parents, and it was like a second honeymoon for them, the pink sandy shore, the palm trees. But the moment they came home his mind was full of Nort again. A few days before Christmas he had to go to Pittsburgh for a meeting, but when still at the airport he was consumed with the awareness that Nort was in his house, joking amiably with Jason and Samantha. Grimly Finch boarded his plane, sat in a cold funk of silence all the way and, in Pittsburgh, bought a ticket on the next flight back to JFK. A light snowfall had begun, and his car, sitting in the vast lot, looked dainty and virginal in its thin white mantle. He reached home at midnight. The bedroom light was on. Finch let himself in and took the stairs two at a time. Jennifer was sitting up in bed, naked at least to the waist, her bare breasts blazing at him like beacons, and next to her, relaxed, comfortable, his hands clasped behind his head, was a slender, naked young man, perhaps thirty at most, with cool green eyes and dense red hair that clung to his head in a curious caplike way.

  Finch felt a kind of relief. “You’re Nort?”

  “Yes. Is time we finally met, I think, Mr. Dale.”

  “Mr. Finch. Or Dale.” Nort had some slight accent. Finch said, “I don’t know what the protocol is in a thing like this. I suppose I should be furious and smash things and make threats. But I’m hollow inside by now. I’ve known about this a long time.”

  “We know,” Jennifer said. “Why else would you have kept coming here trying to catch us in the middle of the night?”

  “Twice,” said Nort. “This be the third. I thought this time I stay and talk with you.”

  “You were here the other two times?”

  “Certainly. But Jennifer wanted no face-to-face. So when the Dale-detector went off, I did the vanish. You follow?”

  Finch stared wearily at his wife. “Jennifer, who is this man and how did he get into our lives?”

  “He’s my nephew,” she said.

  “You have no—”

  “—eleven generations removed.”

  “What?”

  “A remote descendant in my sister’s line. He comes from A.D. 2215. He’s here to do research.”

  Finch thought of the toys Nort had given Jason. His eyes glazed.

  Nort said. “I make the field trip, you follow? I do genealogical research, visit the ancestors, family anecdotes. In my era is very important, knowing the history. I have made many journeys over a long span.”

  “He has my whole family tree,” said Jennifer. “I never knew it, but I’m descended from Millard Fillmore and Johann Sebastian Bach and possibly John of Gaunt.”

  Finch nodded. “That’s fascinating.”

  Nort said, “We do not interfere, you know. We move around like spies, doing our studies and never interacting with the past-folk, out of fear of consequences, of course. But this was an exception. I was captivated by Jennifer instantly.”

  “Captivated,” said Finch bleakly.

  “Captivated, yes. We became lovers. It is a kind of incest, I imagine, but is not very serious, outside the direct maternal line, yes? My studies suffer. Now I come only to this year. Jennifer is a wonderful woman. You know?”

  “I know, yes.” Finch looked toward Jennifer. “I haul my ass over eight states peddling primitive data-processing devices while you amuse yourself with a lover from the twenty-third century. That absolutely captivates me, Jennifer. I can’t tell you how—”

  “Dale, please. You know I love you. But—but—”

  Nort looked troubled. “You are not accepting of this?”

  “I am not accepting, no,” Finch said.

  “But this is the late twentieth century, a decadent time for the marriage custom, and you are sophisticated, educated, elite persons. It is my understanding that toleration of nonmarital sexual interpersonation is widespread in your cohort. You are displeased I love your wife?”

  “Very,” said Finch in a gray voice. He lowered himself into the chair by the window and said, “You’re a hell of a guy for keeping a straight face, Nort. I have to admire that. Throughout this whole routine you’ve been very convincing. But I’m worn out, and I can’t take any futuristic rigmarole any more. Please put your clothes on and go away and don’t come back, and leave Jennifer and me to pick up the pieces of our marriage. Okay? Because if I catch you here again, I might do something violent, which is against my nature, and I’ll probably have to divorce Jennifer, which is the last thing in the world I want to do even now.”

  “You doubt I am from a future time?”

  “I doubt you are from a future time, yes.”

  Nort climbed out of the bed. Finch noticed a thin plastic band of some constantly oscillating greenish color around his left thigh. He touched it and disappeared, and when he reappeared, a moment later, he was in a different corner of the room, holding out a folded newspaper to Finch. Finch glanced at it: the New York Times for April 16, 2037. The main headline was something about Pope Sixtus performing Easter services on the moon. Finch made a little choking sound and started to scan the other stories, but Nort, with an apologetic smile, took the paper from him, vanished again, and reappeared without it, back in the bed. “I have sorrow,” he said softly, “but I am forbidden to let you inspect the newspaper in detail. Shall I do other things? What would convince you I am genuine?”

  Finch wanted to sob. He shook his head and said, “Don’t bother. I don’t need to know. You probably are what you say you are. Will you go away now? Go a
nnoy Millard Fillmore.”

  “I am loving your wife.”

  “You have loved my wife. That’s the correct grammar. It’s over. Listen, I’m a ruthless late-twentieth-century man, and you’re on dangerous ground. I have weapons. If you’re killed while on a field trip, will you stay dead in 2215?”

  Jennifer said, “Dale, stop talking that way.”

  “What do you want me to say? He flashes in here like something out of Buck Rogers, he screws my wife every time I look the other way, he upsets my daughter and alienates my son with his crazy future toys, and now I’m supposed to—”

  “You mustn’t threaten him, Dale. You’re behaving extremely prehistorically. Haven’t you ever had an affair?”

  “Never. Not once.”

  “Those motels—”

  “Not once. I suppose you’ve had plenty, though.”

  “Two before this one,” she said, reddening a little. “I thought you knew. This isn’t 1906, after all. They were both absolutely casual.”

  Finch thought of that polished perfect sphere that was his metaphor for the flawlessness of his relationship with Jennifer. He thought of the two-bodied male-female entities of Plato’s Symposium. His face was leaden and his hands shook.